Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

Apple is the only one that doesn’t seem to start up hundreds of obviously useless projects.

Google will hire thousands to work on an obviously doomed streaming service, to build a new OS, and so many other obviously bad ideas and then just fire them all later.

Vanishingly few Apple products seem to be discontinued. Usually after a long life like the iPod.

View on HN

You wouldn't know about Apple's failed projects. Like other big tech companies, Apple has teams working on R&D and new products. Unlike the other big tech companies, the bar for publicly releasing a new product is extremely high at Apple, and unreleased products are kept secret.

Exactly right. Just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it's not there.

Don't they have an Apple Car? Like a literal car they were working on making? I guess that's the exception though.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/12/apple-is-allegedly-work...

They do tons of R&D work and sometimes they’re working silently for many years before they release an actual product. This was the case with iPhone for example.

Is that useless? Or has it just not been released yet?

Or Airpower.

I would say that their push for smart speakers has also yielded mediocre results, at best. Let's see what will happen with their AR headset, as they have been working on AR since at least 2017 [0].

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/05/the-full-saga-of-app...

A/UX, Taligent, Dylan, Pippin, Java Bridge, Quickdraw 3D, Copland,...

We don't know more due to the secrecy.

EDIT: A few more I just remembered, MacRuby, OpenCL, WebObjects, Quicktime

These are over twenty years old with some pushing thirty

Age doesn't change facts.

But it does change what makes sense to talk about in terms of "Apple" as it exists today.

Otherwise you might as well talk about why IBM is an undefeatable behemoth that dominates the industry...oh, wait, what's that? That hasn't been true for over 30 years now? I thought age didn't change facts?

You mean the company that is usually the champion on patents per year, owns a large portion of Linux, GNOME and GCC development, is the 2nd major Java vendor, and has had quite a good fiscal year, including growth in mainframe and micro sales?

A behemoth indeed, only HN isn't paying attention where it matters.

Titan is another recent big bet that went nowhere, but so happened to be too big to hide. Who knows gow many other secret dead-end projects they buried.

It was never announced so not comparable to other's dropping projects once they're in the open, and if all we're relying on are rumours and industry analysts, then those still say they're continuing the work on Titan, with a view towards a 2025-2028 launch.

And before Jobs' return to be Apple CEO.

> Java Bridge, MacRuby

These were arguably pretty reasonable hedging; it was _far from certain_ that developers would accept Objective C, and then later there was a general sense that dynamic interpreted languages might eat the world. I can't imagine either were particularly expensive; MacRuby in particular was basically someone's side project?

> WebObjects

This was inherited, and was pretty successful in its day (though it did perhaps outstay its welcome).

Most of the others you name are either _very_ old, or were actually quite useful in their day but have aged out.

> Quicktime

Quicktime was never cancelled. It was adopted industry wide as the MP4 file format.

> MPEG-4 Part 14 is an instance of the more general ISO/IEC 14496-12:2004 (MPEG-4 Part 12: ISO base media file format) which is directly based upon the QuickTime File Format which was published in 2001.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP4_file_format

Compare to something like Microsoft's Kin Phone.

Microsoft paid half a billion dollars to buy Andy Rubin's company, Danger. They decided to rewrite the platform from Java to Dot Net, which took so long the product was no longer competitive when they finished. Then they spent a fortune to advertise a product that was canceled after two weeks.

Then Microsoft decided to take another huge pile of cash and set that on fire by purchasing Nokia's mobile phone business.

> Microsoft wasted at least $8 billion on its failed Nokia experiment

https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/25/11766540/microsoft-nokia-...

Researching a potential product and deciding not to go ahead with it is nowhere near the same order of magnitude on the monetary waste scale.

Well to compare Apples to Apples we would need to know how much money Apple has spent with many of those efforts, which before Jobs came back almost driven the company to bankruptcy.

For younger generations Apple might feel unstoppable, meanwhile I remember the discussions to migrate away from surviving Macs on our IT department, and my graduation thesis was porting a particle simulation engine from NeXTSTEP into Windows, as those boxes were to be sent away.

We don't have to wonder with Microsoft. Again and again they have paid billions of dollars for complete failures like the Surface RT and Windows RT. They would have been well advised to cancel the platform before spending a fortune on advertising and unsold inventory.

Hell, how much did they pay for Skype, despite already having several text and video chat clients of their own? Then they completely rewrote Skype before replacing it with Teams.

They have a longstanding habit of taking shareholder value and creating huge bonfires from it.

QuickTime wasn’t a failure. It was the basis of their entire media playback API for over two decades. WebObjects came in with the acquisition of NeXT and from what I gather is still the basis of the backend of iTunes and the App Store. Most of the rest were pre 1997.

Doesn't matter when it happened.

Yep you’re right. I don’t know why Apple was dumb enough to release the Apple /// in 1982.

While I respect Apple as a whole, "they didn't start up hundreds of obv useless projects" is an empty claim. Not only they sank so much money into subpar offerings like iCloud/iWork, not pay attention to some of their competitive advantages like Automator, they ran some of their once-great stuff into ground as well (Finalcut pro).

iCloud is pretty good now and generating a fair amount of revenue for them so I’d say that paid off eventually.

I prefer Google's method of open sourcing their work. it benefits humanity in the long term, where Apples software generally benefits Apple and is only allowed to run on their "blessed" hardware.

Thanks to Google we have patent-free codecs, an open source mobile OS, and they contribute significantly to the Linux kernel, among other projects that are "available to the public".

Like AMP..

Google does what's best for Google.

Not saying that's necessarily always a bad thing for the end user, but they do play the long game. Chrome was great at the start, did a lot to drive the web forward, and is now suffocating those advancements with Manifest V3 etc (including delaying removal of third party cookies).

It almost feels like embrace, extend, extinguish..

useless *public projects

Fixed it for you!

I still remember Ping.

apple does start and fail a lot of projects, you won't notice because they keep them secret.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com